Julia's Chocolates. Cathy Lamb

through all those pins. “Very sure?”

      “Yes, of course.” And inside me, that’s when the real screaming started. Long, high-pitched, raw. It had been quieter for months before then—smothered—but, sometimes I could almost hear my insides crying. I had ignored it. I had a fiancé, finally, and I was keeping him.

      I had dug my way out of trailer life and scrambled through school while working full time and battling recurring nightmares of my childhood. I had a decent job in an art museum. People actually thought—and this was the hilarious part—that I was normal. The rancid smell of poverty and low-class living had become but a whiff around me.

      I tried to be proud of that.

      At that point, the day the dressmaker fitted me, the wedding was exactly two weeks away. Exactly two weeks later I was on the fly.

      I bent again to the cracked earth and caught up a handful of dirt, heaving it straight up at the dress, sputtering when some of it landed back on my head.

      I spit on the ground, wiping the tears off my face with my dirty hands, flinching when I pressed my left eye too hard, the skin still swollen. Damn. That had been the last straw. I was not going to walk down the aisle with a swollen, purple, bloodied eye.

      Then everyone would know how desperate I was.

      I whipped around on my heel to the car, then floored the accelerator, the old engine creaking in protest. My wedding dress flapped its good-bye like a ghost. Sickening.

      Goodbye, dress, I thought, wiping another flood of tears away. I’m broke. I’m scared shitless. Inhaling is often difficult for me because of my Dread Disease. But I have no use for you, other than as a decoration on a dead tree in hell.

      I was now headed for the home of my Aunt Lydia in Oregon. Everyone else in our cracked family (cousins and aunts and uncles) thinks she’s crazy, which means that she is the only sane one in the bunch.

      Robert would come after me, but it would take him a while to find me, as my mother had run off again last week—with her latest boyfriend, to Minnesota—and would not be able to give him Aunt Lydia’s address. I almost laughed. Robert would feel so inconvenienced.

      But he would come. Burning with fury and humiliation, he would come to eke out some sick, twisted punishment.

      My hands shook. I gripped the steering wheel tighter.

      Aunt Lydia is my mother’s older half sister. Although my mother decided to marry no less than five times, and have only one (unplanned) child, my aunt has never married or had children. She lives on a farm outside the small town of Golden, Oregon, in a rambling hundred-year-old farmhouse.

      When I was a child, Lydia would pay for my plane ticket to come and see her during the summer for six weeks. It was the highlight of my life, a pocket of peace next to my mother’s rages and her boyfriends’ wandering hands and bunched fists.

      Two years ago, before I met Robert, I visited Aunt Lydia. When I arrived she was standing in front of her home, hands on her hips, with that determined look on her face.

      When I got close, she engulfed me in a huge hug, then another, and another. “The house is depressed, Julia!” she bellowed, which is the way she always talks. She never speaks at a normal volume; it’s always at full speed, full blast. Her long gray hair floated about her face in the light breeze. “It’s anxious. On edge. Sad. It needs cheering up!”

      My suitcases were piled around me, and I was still clutching a gift to her, a large yellow piggy bank shaped like a pig. I knew she would love it.

      “This house should be pink!” She jabbed a finger in the air. “Like a camellia. Like a vagina!”

      That week we painted the house pink, like a camellia and a vagina, and the shutters white. “The door to this house must be black,” Aunt Lydia announced, her loud voice chasing birds from the tree. “It will ward off evil spirits, disease, and seedy men, and we certainly don’t need any of that, now, do we, darlin’?”

      “No, Aunt Lydia,” I replied, nudging my glasses back up my nose. At the time I hadn’t had a date in four years, so even a seedy man might be interesting to me, but I did not say that aloud. My last date had asked me, in a sneaky sort of way, if I had any family money to speak of. When I said I didn’t, he excused himself to the bathroom, and I had picked up the check and left when it was clear he was gone for good.

      We painted the front door black.

      During my visit, people would come to a screeching halt in front of Aunt Lydia’s house, as usual. Not because it looked like a pink marshmallow, burned in the center, and not just because she has eight toilets in her front yard.

      But let me tell you about the toilets. Two toilets are tucked under a fir tree, two are by the front porch, and the rest are scattered about on the grass. All of them are white, and during every season of the year Aunt Lydia fills them with flowers. Geraniums in the summer, mums in the fall, pansies in the winter, and petunias in the spring. The flowers burst out of those toilets like you wouldn’t believe, spilling over the sides.

      She also built, with her farmer friend Stash, a huge, arched wooden bridge smack in the middle of her green lawn. The floor of the bridge is painted with black and white checks, and the rails are purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Yes, just like a rainbow.

      But I think it’s what is under the trellises that has drivers screeching to a halt. Four trellises, to be exact, lined up like sentinels in the front yard, which are all covered with climbing, blooming roses during the summer. The roses pile one on top of another, dripping down the sides and over the top in soft pink, deep red, and virginal white. And underneath each of the trellises sits a giant concrete pig. Yes, a pig. Each about five feet tall. Aunt Lydia loves pigs. Around the neck of each pig she has hung a sign with the pig’s name. Little Dick. Peter Harris. Micah. Stash.

      These are the names of men who have made her mad for one reason or another. Little Dick refers to my mother’s first husband and my father. His real name was Richard and he decided to leave when I was three.

      It is my earliest memory. I am running down the street as fast as I can, crying, wetting my pants, the urine hot as it streams down my legs. My father is tearing down the street on his motorcycle after fighting again with my mother. The plate she threw at him cracked above his head on the wall, missing him by about an inch.

      The dish was the last straw, I guess.

      Within a week, another man was spending the night in our home. Soon he was Daddy Kevin. Followed by Daddy Fred. Daddy Cuzz. Daddy Max. Daddy Spike, and numerous other daddies. I have not seen my father since then, although I have heard that he was invited to be a guest in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

      The pig named Peter Harris is named after Peter Harris. He is a snobby bank teller in town who refused to take a four-dollar service charge off Aunt Lydia’s bank account and then explained the situation to her in a loud and slow voice as if she were a confused and dottery old woman. For her revenge, she simply asked her friend Janice, a concrete artist, to make her another giant pig and then hung the Peter Harris sign around his neck.

      When the pigs were featured in a local newspaper, Peter Harris was plenty embarrassed and came out to the farm in his prissy bank suit and told Aunt Lydia to take down the sign.

      “I…CAN’T…DO…THAT!” she said, nice and slow, at full volume, as he had done to her. “THE PIG LIKES HIS NAME AND WON’T ALLOW ME TO CHANGE IT.”

      When Peter started to argue with her, she said, “YOU OBVIOUSLY DON’T UNDERSTAND THE SITUATION. DO YOU HAVE A RELATIVE WHO COULD EXPLAIN THIS TO YOU?”

      He kept arguing, stupid man, and even reached for the sign around the five-foot-tall pig’s neck, but Aunt Lydia said again, “THERE ARE A LOT OF PEOPLE IN LINE TODAY. PLEASE, MOVE ALONG.”

      Peter Harris got a little more peeved then and told Lydia he was going to sue her from this side of Wednesday to the next. His anger didn’t faze Aunt Lydia.

      He